The astronomical unit (AU), which Nature News calls “the rough distance from the Earth to the Sun” and Wikipedia refers to as “the average distance between the Earth and the Sun (roughly speaking)”, has been defined as fixed at 149,597,870,700 metres. This standard was adopted by unanimous vote at the International Astronomical Union’s meeting in…
Mathblogging.org ‘Mathematical Instruments’: interviews with mathematical bloggers
The Mathblogging.org blog has a new series of posts, ‘Mathematical Instruments’, highlighting mathematical bloggers. The posts take the form of an interview in which the subject answers questions about their blog and blogging in general. The first post explains that this will let bloggers tell you a little bit about themselves. We call it “Mathematical…
Higgs boson discovery passes peer review
The discovery of the Higgs boson, which “completes the standard model [of particle physics]” according to New Scientist, has passed peer review. Two papers, from the two experiments which each contributed to the discovery, have been published in Volume 716, Issue 1 (17 September 2012) of Physics Letters B, the same journal as Peter Higgs’ original…
Carnival of Mathematics 90
The next issue of the Carnival of Mathematics, rounding up blog posts from the month of August, is now online at Walking Randomly. The Carnival rounds up maths blog posts from all over the internet, including some from our own Aperiodical. For more information about the Carnival of Mathematics, click here.
#MTT2K: Teachers critique Khan Academy
Pretty much everyone has an opinion about learning, and the teaching that causes, impedes or just precedes it. Sal Khan famously just started making videos with the aim of helping people learn, without paying much attention to the hows and whys of pedagogy. That means that pretty much everyone has an opinion about Sal’s site,…
Rubik’s Tube
Numberphile filmmaker and general internet legend Brady Haran has been busy putting together a series of YouTube videos about the Rubik’s cube, with contributions from Aperiodical friends Matt Parker and James Grime. The videos also feature lots of solving clips sent in by viewers, and Aperiodical Editor triumvir and sometime maths-talker-abouter Katie Steckles (that’s me)…
Science Lives profile of Robert MacPherson
Just quickly, here’s something I saw on MetaFilter and enjoyed. The Simons Foundation has a “Science Lives” series of “extended interviews with some of the giants of twentieth century mathematics and science”. This one is with Robert MacPherson, who invented instersection homology with Mark Goresky. I’d never heard of him and topology gives me the…